


Summer

by apiphile



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: BDSM, Bargaining, Choking, Established Relationship, F/M, Het, Paris (City), dom!ariadne, nailsverse, small work in part of a greater whole, stairwells really do echo, sub!eames, terrible things lurking just out of sight, unpleasantly accurate descriptions of bodily fluids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-16
Updated: 2011-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-15 17:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/163214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short, PwP-ish increment of life in the "Nailsverse" (or as it's listed on my profile, the "End of Mr Eames" series).</p><p>It's summer and horrible and Eames is being a nuisance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer

In August Paris is deader than the fat blue-bottles who have succumbed to Eames's surprisingly accurate swats with the day's copy of _Le Monde_. The air is oppressive and thick whether it rains or not, and the apartment windows standing open at all times does little to move the sweat from swamping every moment spent indoors; outside is even worse, but Eames is not about to start wearing shorts. That would be unseemly.

"You should probably shower," Ariadne says, leaning back on her chair for a moment. She's passed the draft stage of the design, which is good, because sweat has this tendency to smear pencil and soak paper, and no matter how delicious she smells she's still human and susceptible to Parisian summer. And the model stage has yet to materialise, which means his darling is spending every hour of her working day hunched like an especially pretty and intense gargoyle over a small white laptop doing incomprehensible things with very specific software. Every time he tries to look she calls him something scathing and tells him to stop interrupting her, so he's resigned himself to newspapers, comic books - bless the French and their love of pictures with stories - and occasionally threatening to go to the cinema to no response.

(Reading novels makes him want to set fire to his own brain and audio books creep him out).

"At some point in my life I will, no doubt, feel moved to shower again," Eames agrees, slowly disintegrating into a liquid form on the Ugly Sofa, which is his in the same way that a dog's basket is the dog's. "This shirt will thank me for it and my balls will be ecstatic. Really, I'm just prolonging the misery because it will be so much more blissful when it _finally ceases_."

"I'm sorry your balls are suffering," Ariadne says, and she sounds almost sincere, "but is there any _actual_ reason for you not to go away and do it now? I can smell you from over here."

"Please don't pretend you're not intrigued by my musk," Eames says with a primness whose he knows she will recognise and be irritated and insulted by. "Anyway, I can smell you, and you don't hear me dropping outrageously girthy hints about your bathing habits. _I'm_ just enjoying the olfactory experience."

To his disappointment Ariadne only shakes her head in despair and rolls her shoulders back slowly, each in turn. "Go away and shower. _I_ can spray perfume over the worst excesses, but if _you_ ever use as much cologne as you did yesterday I will personally drown you in the Seine."

Eames perks as up as he's able to under the weight of the sweltering air rendering him boneless and distinctly uncomfortable. "Do I detect a hint of _going out_ in your voice?"

"Oh God, you already know, stop being ridiculous," Ariadne mutters, doing something fast and intricate with her hands to the lucky, lucky laptop's keyboard. "And as soon as I start telling you you'll interrupt and tell me twenty things I never mentioned that you have absolutely no way of knowing. And I'm too hot and tired to put up with you pretending to be Sherlock Holmes so just _go and have a shower because you smell_."

Eames gives a theatrical sniff at his armpits, stretching his arms over his head at strange angles - the shirt fabric catches in the crease of flesh and chafes - to get his nose against the fabric. It's true, he reeks, they both do, but that's hardly the point. "GOOD LORD," he says, loudly enough that people in the street below are probably wrinkling their noses at this unwarranted explosion of _English_ profanity, "I SMELL DISGUSTING. I MUST SHOWER AT ONCE."

"Better," Ariadne sighs, a smile in her voice.

He half-stands and half-slithers off the sofa, his clothes sticking to his back like paparazzi to a teen starlet. Poly cotton blends may not be the classist choice of shirt in the world but it at least is of no matter if he stains this one with Parisian pollutants and his own body chemistry; Eames inspects the brown-and-orange stripes with tiny dancing African women on them with a kind of fondness. "You're only so insistent because you want to see me naked," he announces, wiping sweat from his face for the first time in a hour. He feels unpleasant, but he's felt a lot worse.

"All the time," Ariadne says distantly, "go away now, please."

He reaches the doorway to the hall - they technically share a bathroom with the apartments next door, but in practice their neighbours had an en suite built and have not been seen since - and turns on his heel, his foot burning on the carpet through the hole in his mustard-yellow sock. "These people we're meeting, tonight. The ones I am supposed to be the accessory to your heterosexuality and stability for, so they'll stop getting their horrible little kilts in a tangle about how you must _obviously_ be a dyke because they haven't met your _lovely_ other half yet -"

"Didn't I just tell you not to do that?"

"- You do realise that I'm going to tell them I'm a professional circus clown," Eames finishes, "or a urinal-cleaner who married you for a work permit."

"Yes, I do realise," Ariadne say, rummaging in the back of her hair for a pen and making note of something on the back of an envelope - Eames smirks to himself at that, the Ariadne he first met would still have bothered with a notepad - before going back to poking at the wireframe. "Which is why I told them you're an actor."

"Oh that was unnecessarily cruel."

"It would explain everything," Ariadne says triumphantly, and Eames curses himself and her in the same internal breath. "The erratic work periods. The mannerisms. The fact that you never have any money. The _attention-seeking_."

"You are an evil, evil bitch," Eames says in tones of considerable surprise, leaning on the door frame. The door is open to the cool stone corridor beyond, where any passing visitor might overhear them, and the corridor leads to the stairwell, and the stairwell echoes very effectively. He is aware of this, as he has been for a long time, and not only because he spent a bored afternoon conducting experiments with a noise meter and a rifle mic when Yusuf visited and actually _went_ to his conference. "They'll want to know if they've seen me in anything before, and then what will you do?"

"Oh I didn't tell them you were a _good_ actor," Ariadne says, and he can see the back of her cheek rise with the smile from this angle.

Eames mock-huffs out into the corridor and down to the bathroom. Contrarian and vicious as it is, there is no cold water in the building's heater pipes this summer, in the same way that there is routinely no warm water in the pipes during the winter - he concludes his test on the bathroom sink with an attempt to see if the hot tap is any colder and nearly takes the skin off his hand.

Because he's alone and there's no one to perform it for, he doesn't make a big thing of the pain, just turns the tap back off and runs his fingers under the slightly-less-hot-tap until they're less troubling. An audience would have solicited a yelp and a wounded look, but when he looks into the mirror the stillness on his face is almost as chronic as Arthur's.

Eames is naked from the waist down when he hears footsteps in the corridor, and though he knows in the slower-moving part of his brain that contains reason and recent memories that it is Ariadne, his faster and less reasonable mind wants to know why he hasn't locked the door and sends him scrambling for a weapon - the best thing he can find is a full shampoo bottle, which will probably make more of a mess than a mark if he hurls it at someone - ridiculous and vulnerable with his balls sticking scared and sweaty to his thigh as he lurches away from the door with his heart pounding.

Ariadne's hair is limp and her t-shirt has sweat patches in the armpits too, her decolletage visible in the stretched-out neck, bare and glistening, sweat pooling in the dip between her collarbones. She stares at him strangely for a minute and holds out a towel. "You might need this."

Of course. They stopped leaving them in the bathroom because, while shampoo was apparently of no interest to anyone else in the apartments, towels were like inexplicable catnip to their neighbours and kept disappearing into other people's possession.

"I might have been planning to air-dry on the way back from the shower," Eames says, taking the towel with a degree of dignity neither of them believes for a second. The tiles of the bathroom are lavender and painted with a faint bamboo pattern; Eames tries to ignore the feeling that something is moving through the bamboo shoots to stare at him.

"You might," Ariadne concedes, "which is why I brought the towel."

"Not because you were fed up with wireframes and needed a break and remembered I was just about to get naked," Eames says, inspecting her face carefully for any sign that she's genuinely annoyed. So far, so good. There are lavender bamboo shoots on the shower curtain, too, and he resists the urge to rub the back of his neck against the lavender tiger he feels is lurking in the printed forest. She must have been the last of them to use the bathroom, because the shower curtain is pulled all the way across the alcove where the shower head is, and he would never, ever be so foolish.

"I've timed it wrong," Ariadne agrees, closing the door behind her and - to Eames' considerable relief - locking it behind her. "You're not naked. Should I go away and make coffee instead?"

His shoulder nearly dislocates with the speed at which Eames sheds his shirt, and he definitely loses a few buttons (plastic, missable, replaceable - it's not like he can't sew) and hears something fabric tear; it's a cheap shirt and its ruination is more than worth the smile she tries to hide behind dismay at his antics.

The smile and the dismay are both fronts, of course; Eames is enough of a mask-maker to know a mask when he sees one, and no matter how much practice she has and how many lessons - intentional and accidental - she takes from him, Ariadne is a terrible liar.

So he's not exactly _not_ expecting it when her voice is a little huskier than it is ordinarily, when she bats the towel out his ready hands and says, "Down."

Much as Eames would like to drop immediately to his knees there is the aggravatingly indelible and incontrovertible _fact_ that no matter how he lies, evades the reasons, or denies it, his knees do not work very well. They are about as functional as his conscience, which is to say that they can be coaxed into working and are theoretically good for most things they're needed for, but they need a bit of warning and after too much use they tend to short-circuit. In fact, they are almost identical to his conscience in this respect.

However he gives his kneecaps a furtive squeeze that might pass for a massage and they make a horrible grinding noise but he gets down on the smooth cold lavender-bamboo bathroom floor and wonders why he didn't just come in here and lie down on the tiles to escape the muggy heat; Eames's memory snakes a tendril from out of Pandora's heavily-locked Box and taps him on the shoulder. _Do you want to remember the last time you were naked on a tiled floor_.

He tips his head back in the low glow of the "energy efficient" light which hums like a discontented fridge and holds her gaze as he gamely stuffs the last snarling shreds of memory back into their lead-lined box. The time for smart remarks has passed, which normally means he'd go ahead and make another one to see if she'll slap him, but there's something a little otherworldly about this odd capsule of cold in the centre of all the heat and humidity and he just wants to press his face against the barely perceptible curve between her belly and her pubis and hold it there, breathing.

Ariadne says, "One more thing."

Eames doesn't answer her, just watches the way her lips move over her teeth when she talks, the way he can actually _see_ her teeth when she's looking at him like this instead of mumbling. God does she mumble. He imagines himself in fifty years being frustrated and infuriated by it; he imagines himself in fifty years and nearly starts laughing. Like she'd keep him.

"What exactly do I have to do to get you behave yourself with these people?" The towel lies between them in a heap like the Alps, and she regards him with that look which always feels like it's digging through his brain with a set of skeleton keys and an FBI badge.

Eames shrugs. "Is it important?"

"Yes, it's important. Forty thousand Euro contract important."

"Then I will behave myself in a manner precisely tailored to whatever you want, my dear," Eames says, curling his hands behind his back in the opposite of prayer. "You only had to say."

"You are an aggravating prick."

Eames glances down. He can't actually see his own dick over his belly in the current state, just a vague poof of pubic hair, but that says it all, really. "It's not, but give it a little encouragement and I'm sure it will be."

She sighs and steps forward, onto the towel. "As long as you promise to - what am I saying?" Ariadne puts her hand on the top of his head, as if in benediction. Touching his hair right now must be beyond revolting, but it doesn't seem to bother her any more. "You and promises. Alright. Just ... keep that forty thousand euro contract in your mind if you decide to start acting like a -"

"Don't I do what you tell me?" Eames asks, tipping his head at the right angle to almost perfectly align his pupils, looking up, with hers, looking down. It's a cheap manipulative trick and he hates himself for it but they can go over this until judgement day and she will still worry until after the contract's signed; meanwhile he's naked on his knees with her hand on his head and the air is full of possibilities he'd like to _resolve_.

Ariadne slips her hand from the top of his head and he can feel the grease and sweat of his own hair on her palm as it slides down over his cheek, through the bristles he will have to remove before this evening, as it rests, facing up, under his chin. There is no need for her to jerk his head from side to side as if inspecting him for traces of untruth, of course, but she does it anyway; she knows it is futile - Eames hides his lies far below the skin - and he knows she knows. He resists enough that she knows he is resisting, and no more.

Her hand moves very slowly, spreading across his neck, just below his chin. He knows before it does what she's going to do - there are delicate pre-movement twitches in her muscles, there's a look in her eyes, and there's a percentage he could probably work out if he cared to, a percentage of certainty. He _knows_ her, and he knows enough about the way her wrist is rotated and the dilation of her pupils and the answering twitch in the pit of his belly. Ariadne's hand is far, far smaller than his neck, but it's wide enough.

He can feel, for a moment before such precision is impossible, the pulse in her thumb. Her heart, her blood in the tip of her body, over the pulse in his neck. Cartoid artery, the one that pumps blood to the brain, although he imagines it's pumping a little less up there now what with events downstairs beginning to take a turn. Eames can feel four small fingers not so much cupping his jawline now as pressing into it, and as the muscles adductor pollicis, _transversus_ and _obliquus_ \- (a section of anatomy so intriguing he was moved to flirt the name of it out of a doctor, his own special brand of research revealing a certain poetry within the hand) - as space between her fingers and thumb cuts softly into his trachea the ability to reason clearly takes a swift holiday.

Eames is so preoccupied with the air that isn't going to his brain and the sharp points of pressure in his neck that for a second he almost doesn't notice that she is kissing him; he can hardly respond, his body fighting for breath in spite of him, but he tries to touch his tongue to hers, to keep the gap between them closed at the cost of his lungs and his head and the ache in his throat that becomes an ache in his chest that becomes an altogether more bearable and insistent ache in his balls. His hands clutch each other behind his back, and as she kisses down and presses down he rises as best he can. Her lips are dry.

His knees ache, too, on the cold tiled floor, and even in the cool isolated air of the bathroom he can feel his skin beginning to grow slippery with sweat - it is a distant annoyance, as irrelevant as a fly buzzing in the next room, because his whole world has shrunk to the places where her body touches his. His mouth, his throat. The places where she obliterates air with herself: his mouth, his throat, struggling to hold his eyes open even though he can no longer meet her eye. The places where she cuts him out of the world and makes him her own; his mouth, his throat, and a last, her free hand shaking a little as a tear falls onto his upturned face, wetter and hotter than the summer, his nose as she pinches it shut and for a moment Eames is sure he will die.


End file.
